Where Are You? Unscented Particle Filter for Single Range Relative Pose Estimation in Unobservable Motion Using UWB and VIO.
 
Where Are You? Unscented Particle Filter for Single Range Relative Pose Estimation in Unobservable Motion Using UWB and VIO. 
 
Yuri Durodié, Bryan Convens, Gaoyuan Liu, , Adrian Munteanu, Bram Vanderborght
 
Abstract 

Abstract—Real-time relative pose (RP) estimation is a corner-stone for effective multi-agent collaboration. When conventionalglobal positioning infrastructure such as GPS is unavailable, theuse of Ultra-Wideband (UWB) technology on each agent providesa practical means to measure inter-agent range. Due to UWB{\textquoteright}sprecise range measurements and robust communication capa-bilities, external hardware installations are not needed. However,when only a single UWB device per agent is used, the relative posebetween the agents can be unobservable, resulting in a complexsolution space with multiple possible RPs. This paper proposes anovel method based on an Unscented Particle Filter (UPF) thatfuses single UWB ranges with visual-inertial odometry (VIO).The proposed decentralized method solves the multi-modal solu-tion in 3D (4-DoF) for the RP when it is unobservable. Moreover,a pseudo-state is introduced to correct the rotational drift ofthe agents. Through simulations and experiments involving tworobots, the proposed solution was shown to be competitive andless computationally expensive than state-of-the-art algorithms.Additionally, the proposed solution provides all possible relativeposes from the first measurement. The code and link to the videoare available https://github.com/y2d2/UPF RPE.